Facebook Traffic Modeling with the BreakingPoint Storm CTM
by Steve McGregoryIn our latest Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) update, we’ve added Super Flows for Facebook and Facebook Graph API protocols, as well as for the popular Farmville game. What do I mean by “Facebook protocol”? Believe it or not, Facebook has become a transport protocol for many applications, i.e. website sharing, Web apps like Farmville and Mafia Wars, and many more applications that all traverse Facebook. Face it, Facebook is a real-world Internet protocol! The BreakingPoint Storm CTM™ can now implement not only Facebook, but also applications like Farmville. Read on to find out more.
According to NetworkBox, Facebook and these applications account for 6.8% of business Internet traffic. Depending on the report Facebook is either the first- or second-most visited site on the Internet. (It jockeys with Google for first place.) This data implies that Facebook traffic ought to be a standard part of your network traffic mix when you’re running simulations—which is why we’re now providing built-in support for Facebook in our product.
This post has a brief discussion of the Facebook Super Flow; in a follow-up post, I’ll show you how you can extend the BreakingPoint Storm CTM to add your own Super Flows, using Farmville as an example.
BreakingPoint’s Facebook Coverage
We’ve supplied you with these new Super Flows: “ClientSim Facebook,” “Facebook,” “Facebook API,” and “Farmville.” “ClientSim Facebook” is capable of connecting directly to Facebook, which requires SSL for authentication; if you provide valid account credentials, you can update your Status, retrieve your News Feed, and more.
The “Facebook” and “Facebook API” Super Flows allow you to add ultra-high-performance Facebook traffic mix to your simulations. These can generate the traffic of millions of simultaneous users, pumping out the Gigs of bandwidth that you need to see how your infrastructure will perform under realistic load. If you need data in other languages, you can also choose German, English, Spanish, or French, as shown below.
No matter which Super Flow and language you are using, you get to choose from a nice set of Facebook protocol actions:
- Login/Logout
- News Feed
- Update Status
- IM Chat
- Messaging
- Facebook Graph API
- Facebook OAUTH 2.0 implementation for authorization
- Create Photo Album
- Upload Photo
- Update Status
- User Data Retrieval
- friends
- home feed
- and many more…
As mentioned above, extending the BreakingPoint Storm CTM™ to model other web applications built on Facebook, or any HTTP application, is a simple task and provides you with just about unlimited possibilities. In my next post I’ll show you how to build new Super Flows to do this, using the popular game Farmville as an example.
